Love Among the Chickens, P. G. Wodehouse [top non fiction books of all time .TXT] 📗

second shot. “All hope abandon ye who enter here” might be written on a notice board over it.

The professor entered there. The unhappy man sent his second, as nice and clean a brassey shot as he had made all day, into its very jaws. And then madness seized him. A merciful local rule, framed by kindly men who have been in that ditch themselves, enacts that in such a case the player may take his ball and throw it over his shoulder, losing a stroke. But once, so the legend runs, a scratch man who found himself trapped, scorning to avail himself of this rule at the expense of its accompanying penalty, wrought so shrewdly with his niblick that he not only got out but actually laid his ball dead: and now optimists sometimes imitate his gallantry, though no one yet has been able to imitate his success.

The professor decided to take a chance: and he failed miserably. As I was on the green with my third, and, unless I putted extremely poorly, was morally certain to be down in five, which is bogey for the hole, there was not much practical use in his continuing to struggle. But he did in a spirit of pure vindictiveness, as if he were trying to take it out of the ball. It was a grisly sight to see him, head and shoulders above the ditch, hewing at his obstinate colonel. It was a similar spectacle that once induced a lay spectator of a golf match to observe that he considered hockey a silly game.

“Sixteen!” said the professor between his teeth. Then he picked up his ball.

I won the seventh hole.

I won the eighth hole.

The ninth we halved, for in the black depths of my soul I had formed a plan of fiendish subtlety. I intended to allow him to win⁠—with extreme labour⁠—eight holes in succession.

Then, when hope was once more strong in him, I would win the last, and he would go mad.

I watched him carefully as we trudged on. Emotions chased one another across his face. When he won the tenth hole he merely refrained from oaths. When he won the eleventh a sort of sullen pleasure showed in his face. It was at the thirteenth that I detected the first dawning of hope. From then onward it grew.

When, with a sequence of shocking shots, he took the seventeenth hole in seven, he was in a parlous condition. His run of success had engendered within him a desire for conversation. He wanted, as it were, to flap his wings and crow. I could see Dignity wrestling with Talkativeness. I gave him the lead.

“You have got back your form now,” I said.

Talkativeness had it. Dignity retired hurt. Speech came from him in a rush. When he brought off an excellent drive from the eighteenth tee, he seemed to forget everything.

“Me dear boy⁠—” he began; and stopped abruptly in some confusion. Silence once more brooded over us as we played ourselves up the fairway and onto the green.

He was on the green in four. I reached it in three. His sixth stroke took him out.

I putted carefully to the very mouth of the hole.

I walked up to my ball, and paused. I looked at the professor. He looked at me.

“Go on,” he said hoarsely.

Suddenly a wave of compassion flooded over me. What right had I to torture the man like this?

“Professor,” I said.

“Go on,” he repeated.

“That looks a simple shot,” I said, eyeing him steadily, “but I might easily miss it.”

He started.

“And then you would win the Championship.”

He dabbed at his forehead with a wet ball of a handkerchief.

“It would be very pleasant for you after getting so near it the last two years.”

“Go on,” he said for the third time. But there was a note of hesitation in his voice.

“Sudden joy,” I said, “would almost certainly make me miss it.”

We looked at each other. He had the golf fever in his eyes.

“If,” I said slowly, lifting my putter, “you were to give your consent to my marriage with Phyllis⁠—”

He looked from me to the ball, from the ball to me, and back again to the ball. It was very, very near the hole.

“Why not?” I said.

He looked up, and burst into a roar of laughter.

“You young devil,” said he, smiting his thigh, “you young devil, you’ve beaten me.”

I swung my putter, and the ball trickled past the hole.

“On the contrary,” I said, “you have beaten me.”

I left the professor at the Club House and raced back to the farm. I wanted to pour my joys into a sympathetic ear. Ukridge, I knew, would offer that same sympathetic ear. A good fellow, Ukridge. Always interested in what you had to tell him; never bored.

“Ukridge!” I shouted.

No answer.

I flung open the dining-room door. Nobody.

I went into the drawing-room. It was empty. I drew the garden, and his bedroom. He was not in either.

“He must have gone for a stroll,” I said.

I rang the bell.

The Hired Retainer appeared, calm and imperturbable as ever.

“Sir?”

“Oh, where is Mr. Ukridge, Beale?”

“Mr. Ukridge, sir,” said the Hired Retainer nonchalantly, “has gone.”

“Gone!”

“Yes, sir. Mr. Ukridge and Mrs. Ukridge went away together by the three o’clock train.”

XXI The Calm Before the Storm

“Beale,” I said, “are you drunk?”

“Wish I was, sir,” said the Hired Man.

“Then what on earth do you mean? Gone? Where have they gone to?”

“Don’t know, sir. London, I expect.”

“London? Why?”

“Don’t know, sir.”

“When did they go? Oh, you told me that. Didn’t they say why they were going?”

“No, sir.”

“Didn’t you ask? When you saw them packing up and going to the station, didn’t you do anything?”

“No, sir.”

“Why on earth not?”

“I didn’t see them, sir. I only found out as they’d gone after they’d been and went, sir. Walking down by the Net and Mackerel, met one of them coastguards. ‘Oh,’ says he, ‘so you’re moving?’ ‘Who’s a-moving?’ I says to him. ‘Well,’ he says to me, ‘I seen your Mr. Ukridge and his missus get into the three o’clock